Spotlight on Jared Goyette: When frontline reporters become victims
Photo Courtesy of @JaredGoyette on Twitter
Freelance journalist Jared Goyette has been on the frontlines of civil rights protests for years, reporting on the killings of Jamar Clark, Michael Brown and, more recently, George Floyd.
Over time, Goyette developed a sense of what the standard operating procedure is, how these events play out and what the expectations of the police are, but the resurging Black Lives Matter protests this summer presented the police with a new “animosity.”
“Journalists were not incidentally targeted, but deliberately targeted,” he said.
Goyette experienced this hostility firsthand on June 3 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, when he was hit in the head with some form of police projectile.
“I was trying to tell the story of a 19-year-old Somali kid named Ali Hussein who was struck in the face – injured more seriously than I was – while he was trying to film,” he said.
In a Twitter post from Goyette, he said Hussein sustained a “hairline fracture by his temple and had bleeding of the brain.” Protesters frantically called for an ambulance that never arrived, so a friend took Hussein in his car. The next thing Goyette knew, he was on the ground after being struck by a projectile himself.
“I am hit from an officer firing from a roof – directly in the head – when I was not on the front line per se,” Goyette narrated, stating that he had stepped away from where protesters and police were directly interacting. “I thought I would not be a target. Like, I was worried about getting hit by a stray [bullet] so that’s why I stepped off to the side.”
Goyette suffered an injury to his nose that could have resulted in loss of eyesight had he not gone to the doctor and taken medication. But a few days later, Goyette was back on the streets documenting the protests.
“If there’s anything that I’m supposed to do in these situations, it’s record what happens to someone like that,” Goyette said, referencing Hussein. “I was naive to think that I wouldn’t be directly targeted, but that’s what I believed.”
Goyette predominantly used social media to display his interactions with law enforcement and other incidents where he was targeted.
“There’s a video where you can just hear me saying, ‘Press, press, press, press,’ and then my voice [gets] more frantic,” Goyette said. “The officers had – I don’t know if they were beanbag guns or whatever – and then they pointed [the guns] at me.”
What the video does not show is the police approaching Goyette afterward. “An officer, like a police car, pulls up next to me ... rolls down his window and says, ‘I wish I could fucking peg you right now,’” Goyette said, explaining that the officer was expressing a desire to physically hit him. “I don’t think he understood the full connotations of that verb, but [then] he just drove off ... if it wasn’t clear to me that they see us the enemy, now it is.”
One of Goyette’s former colleagues, Michael Anthony Adams, who works as a photographer for Vice, was lying on the ground at a Minneapolis Stop & Shop holding his press ID above his head when an officer leaned down and sprayed his face with pepper spray.
In a more heightened incident, one journalist was left permanently blind in one eye by the acts of police aggression. Linda Tirado, a freelance photojournalist, was reporting on the street protests in Minneapolis when she was struck in her left eye by a projectile appearing to come from the direction of the police. “I came to the Minneapolis protests to cover police aggression. Then I became the victim of it,” Tirado said in a personal essay for NBC News.
The growing animosity the police have toward the media is “dangerous,” according to Goyette. “I’m afraid that there’s radicalized elements within the police that are very dangerous.”
There were more than 300 journalists wrongfully arrested or assaulted in the United States from May 26 to June 6, according to the advocacy organizations that compile the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.
“It was a very volatile situation where I wasn’t safe and where if they could get away with it, they would hurt me,” Goyette said, describing what it felt like to be a target of the police. “That guy who rolled down his window ... he basically said, ‘I wish I could hurt you right now.’”
Goyette does not know where this animosity from law enforcement stems from, but it is affecting his role as a journalist.
“[When we are] being directly targeted by police, we can’t do our jobs because it is not safe to be there anymore,” Goyette said. “And then if we’re not there, what happens isn’t independently documented.”
If journalists are not covering protests, then the only voices are those of the protesters and the police. “I don’t think we can trust the police, or for that matter, the people opposed to the police to provide independent documentation of what occurs in those interactions.”
As a result of the ongoing infringement on journalists’ First Amendment rights by police officers, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a class-action lawsuit in collaboration with Goyette on June 2 against the “city of Minneapolis, the Minnesota State Patrol and the Minnesota police.” The case is seeking an order that will declare law enforcement’s actions “unconstitutional” and prohibit them from targeting and attacking reporters again, as well as seeking damages for the injuries sustained.
